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Highlights

The key to achieving a fair and competitive marketplace is ensuring that businesses comply with consumer laws. We focus on achieving high levels of business compliance by working with industry and our partners. We continue to support businesses to be compliant and provide them with tools that support them to meet their obligations.

Under our integrated, risk-based approach to compliance, we act quickly against those causing most harm, protecting consumers earlier, more efficiently and more effectively.

In 2016-17 we used a range of regulatory tools to address poor conduct by businesses and significant breaches of consumer protection laws. The following table - Compliance, registrations and licensing activities undertaken in 2016-17 - provides an overview of our actions in meeting this goal.

As part of our state-wide inspection program, we inspected more than 5,700 Victorian businesses across a range of industries, to promote and test compliance with key consumer protection laws.

We undertook a range of enforcement actions against businesses for unfair and illegal practices, achieving significant outcomes to better protect Victorians.

Note: Data in this table varies between years based on our regulatory risk priorities, government policy, the nature of our compliance program and the cyclical nature of our integrated compliance approach.